


Once More, With Feeling

by badboy_fangirl



Category: Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-21
Updated: 2013-08-21
Packaged: 2017-12-24 04:45:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,145
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/935524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/badboy_fangirl/pseuds/badboy_fangirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For the most part, he and Elena agree on things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Once More, With Feeling

**Author's Note:**

> This is a companion/continuation piece to [learning to be brave in my beautiful mistakes](http://archiveofourown.org/works/901358), but you don't have to read that to know what's going on here. There are direct references to _Buffy, the Vampire Slayer_ in this, but I have only ever seen like two episodes of that show. It just fit thematically with what I wanted to write about, and semele was kind enough to give me a brief overview to help with that theme. Anything that sounds off is completely my fault. Also, the title is lifted from both a famous episode of BTVS and, of course, the mouth of Damon Salvatore himself. Opening verse from P!nk's "Crystal Ball."
> 
>  
> 
> [](http://smg.photobucket.com/user/americanoutlaw/media/TVD/lovemaking003.gif.html)  
> 

_Broken mirrors and a black cat's cold stare,  
Walk under ladders on my way to hell, I'll meet you there.  
But I'm not scared at all._

For the most part, he and Elena agree on things. 

For example, they both love to dance. So, when he can actually convince her to go out to enjoy a snatch, feed, erase (come _on_ , they're on vacation, it's perfectly fine), they find a dance club in the middle of St. Martin, and they feed and dance all night long. There is much more dancing than feeding, and they're vampires, so they can go all night.

And they do.

Elena's smile is so big it hurts him. She's so happy, and it's because of him, and he still doesn't quite trust it, except that that's the only explanation because they are literally thousands of miles from Mystic Falls, and Stefan has been gone all summer, and well. Jeremy's alive, but they've even grown used to that now.

So, yeah, her big-ass smile? All him. All Damon _Fucking_ Salvatore, thank you very much.

He spins her out and hauls her back into his arms, they grind against each other, she laughs, her hands grip his shoulders and ghost over his face, and her lips come close to his and then dart away. The teasing in her eyes makes him hurt in a different way.

(They end up fucking in the bathroom, because good God in heaven, what is he supposed to do with her? She drives him absolutely insane. But in the Elena way, not in the Katherine way, so it's absolutely the best insanity he's ever dived into.)

 

 

They like a lot of the same food (actual food, not blood types, though, like him, she finds AB neg to be the best, because it's the rarest); so when he takes her to fancy restaurants, she tries all the haute cuisine he throws at her, and delights in all of it.

(He delights in her.)

She's willing to try anything, and nothing quells her sense of adventure, not even when he teasingly warns her about the texture of eel or snails. She looks at him over the length of her fork, and he shifts uncomfortably because she can get him hard with just the expression in her eyes, even after they spent _all day_ making love, and didn't even venture out until their dinner reservation.

(No, he _fucking_ delights in her.)

She dabs at her lips with her napkin and flirts with their waitress (yes, _waitress_ , because she's had a few glasses of wine, but seems to instinctively know that this is the thing that will torment him most deliciously -- he can see her feeding from the dark-skinned woman in his mind's eye before offering her up for him to enjoy, and that's way more sexy than any lesbian love fantasy some regular guy might have). Damon cannot quantify what loving Elena Gilbert really means, because it's so new and different and yet so perfectly comfortable that sometimes he has a hard time reaching into his memory just a few short weeks back when he had no idea where he stood with her.

Now he knows, he knows for sure, and it makes him completely insatiable. 

(Which is ridiculous, because he _finally got the girl_ and there should be some chilling out period, but there totally isn't. He just wants her more every day.)

 

 

He comes out of the bathroom one night, rubbing a towel over his wet hair, to find her lying on the bed with the television remote in her hand. She's grinning like a little kid, and he looks questioningly at the show she's watching.

" _Buffy_ reruns," she says, her grin somehow widening, if that's even possible.

At first he thinks she finds it funny because they're vampires, but when he sits down on the edge of the bed and says, "Oh, yeah, I remember this episode," her head whips around so fast her neck cracks. 

The smile drops off her face and she demands "You watched _Buffy_?" in an almost scandalized tone.

Damon smirks. "Of course I did," he says, feeling minor disdain at her shock. "I always had to watch this kinda stuff to see how close it was to the truth. Turns out, I'm pretty sure Joss Whedon doesn't actually know any real vampires. But he got some things right."

Elena surveys him silently for another moment before her eyes dart back to the screen. "What episode is this, then?" she asks, pointing.

(She's testing him? Seriously?)

"It's the musical episode. It's pretty memorable. It's not like I saw every show, but I did watch it pretty faithfully. What about you?"

The smile returns to her face. "I spent a summer watching them all with Jenna. She had the DVDs." She lifts the remote up and mutes the television, rolling up on to her side to look at him. "We watched it every day for weeks. It was totally addicting--and I remember being so sad when it was over." She reaches over to smooth her hand up his arm, cupping his shoulder in her palm. "I was also pissed, though, at the end."

"I know, right?" Damon says agreeably. "How could they kill Spike like that? I mean, I know he wasn't dead-dead, but they never let him and Buffy work shit out. So stupid."

Elena makes a funny sound in her throat. " _Whatever_ , Damon. Buffy belonged with _Angel_." She smiles, but Damon can't quite wrap his mind around what she just said. Then she adds, "Of course, Jenna agreed with you. We used to argue about that all the time."

In his mind, Damon knows they are talking about a television show. He knows this doesn't matter at all, but it doesn't feel like that. Somehow, it's like she just sucker-punched him. He doesn't even know what to say because of the sick feeling in his stomach, so he ends up murmuring, "I always liked Aunt Jenna," and a little frown crosses Elena's forehead.

The mood shifts to something else, something he didn't mean, and when Elena leans up into him, he knows she's kissing him to distract herself from old griefs.

A few minutes later, she slides off the bed, sinking to her knees in front of him. He lets her blow him, but it takes him forever to get there despite her enthusiasm, and by now, her innate knowledge of his body.

(He wishes he could blame it on thoughts about dead relatives.)

 

 

He knows she's almost asleep; he's quite familiar with the looseness that comes over her body as she slips away, but it's dark in their hotel room, and they've just had sex, and he's not going to sleep any time soon (or maybe ever again), unless he gets this off his chest.

"You do realize you're sleeping with Spike, right?"

Elena makes a noise, but it's muffled and so he thinks he waited too long; she's already out, so now he's going to lie there, stewing like a Roma tomato.

Slowly tension comes back into her body, though, and then the word, "What?" fills the room.

She says it quietly, but there's some sort of forcefulness to it that frightens him a little.

(Or maybe it's the thought of this conversation that frightens him.)

(Or maybe it's the longevity of this relationship.)

She sits up, dragging the sheet with her as she leans away from him to snap the bedside lamp on. Light floods the room and they both sit there, blinking as if their eyes don't adjust to sudden brightness much more quickly as vampires; they don't look at each other while the silence grows.

Finally Damon throws his cards out on the table. "I'm _Spike_ , Elena. You can't be with Spike and wish for Angel. It's not going to work."

She's shielding her breasts from his gaze, but she doesn't shield his face from the force of her incredulity when she swings her eyes towards his. "What the hell are you talking about?"

He huffs out an irritated sigh as he jams one arm under the pillow beneath his head to prop it up better. "Buffy. Angel. Spike. Elena. Stefan. Damon." He raises his eyebrows at her, waiting.

Elena shakes her head like she honestly doesn't know what he's saying, and he opens his mouth to elaborate when she barks, "Don't you even! First of all, this is _real life_. Not a television show. And I can like Angel for Buffy, even if I prefer Sp-- _you!_ for myself. Because, _I'm_ not Buffy, and _you're_ not Spike." She scoffs when he attempts to say something else. "Pffft, seriously, you are _not_ Spike. Maybe you'd like to _think_ you're Spike, but you're so not."

She's wrong, of course. Beautiful, sexy with her hair mussed and falling around her shoulders, his whisker burn evident across the soft skin of her throat, and maddening to the point that he's getting hard again, but wrong. Totally _dead_ wrong.

She tosses the sheet back dramatically, exposing both of them. Then she swings herself around so that she's straddling his mid-section, her vagina kissing his navel quite inappropriately. "Do you remember what I said, the first time I told you I love you?" she asks, and the abrupt change of subject sends him reeling.

He's blank for almost ten whole seconds, and he can see the flush creeping her up her chest and neck. How he manages to embarrass her by not remembering quickly enough is not part of his plan.

(Come to think of it, none of this was in the plan. Perhaps he never had a plan at all. Perhaps he should never have let her watch TV.)

"I said it's the most real th--"

"Thing you've ever felt in your entire life, yeah, I know, I was there."

She punches his chest; not hard, but hard enough that he grunts. 

"That's the time you don't really believe because of the sire bond, but that was me, being totally honest. That was me, without a net. That was me, not pissed at you for being willing to just lay down and die--"

"I was never willing to just lay down and die--" he interrupts, but she pinches him and continues on.

"That was _me_ , telling _you_ that before you, there was never anything in my life that was _real_ , Damon. Everything that came before was practice. And with my choosing to accept the love I feel for you, I accepted everything that came with it. What that means for me, and you, and _us_. And that doesn't have _anything_ to do with Buffy and Angel."

She presses her hands flat against his shoulders, peering down into his eyes emphatically. "My 14-year-old self is allowed to love them for what they were and what they meant then. And my forever-18-year-old self is allowed to love you, no matter how difficult you might make it. And please," she all but sneers, "don't kid yourself that at least for the space of a few hours, you figured death would be an easier choice than this. You can go on all you want about happiness and selfishness and blah, blah, blah. But this? Us? It scares the shit out of you."

She doesn't finish that speech with _admit it_ , but he can hear it ringing in the air, can see it echoing in her eyes, can feel it in the tension of her thighs on either side of his waist.

He slowly lifts a hand up, cupping her face into the center of his palm. "If this is the most real thing for _you_ , what the hell do you suppose it is for _me?_ "

That's it, that's all he'll give, but he can see it's enough.

She doesn't say anything else; she just leans in and takes his mouth in a kiss.

 

 

In the morning, he wakes up to a red rose lying on the pillow where she should be. A note written in Elena's bubbly scrawl tells him she's gone down to the beach for an early morning swim.

At the bottom there are some x's and o's and a giant heart with Elena's name above it, an "s" next to it, and Damon's name below it.

He wishes he could be disgusted by her very high school rendering of their relationship. But he can't. Because he's him, and he's waited for her all his life, which consists of about three normal lifetimes. 

In the end, he finds a tack and sticks it up on the wall; then, he finds his swim trunks and follows after her. 

(Or rather, in the beginning. Because this might be the encore where he finally gets his life right, but it most certainly is a beginning. The beginning of the only ending he sees for himself.)


End file.
